Fiction

I stumble down the beach, exhausted, silently savoring midnight above. Infant crabs raise tiny claws at me. Salted spray mists my face. Roiling waves crash and flow, their frothy curls assaulting my raw heels, threatening ...

Isaiah doesn’t remember the wings, but he believes in them because of the knots of flesh on his back: six scarred, lumpy outgrowths of muscle left by a surgeon with shaking hands.  His mother dresses ...

I’m riding my Harley up near the foothills of the San Gabriels. It’s night. I’m a little drunk.  Sunny and me, we had another fight over some nit-picky thing I did, or didn’t do, and ...

The boys and I sat around the kitchen table sharing a snack.  “What did you two get up to this afternoon?” I asked.  I’d spent almost three hours writing, which was a miracle on a ...

Walt returned from work to find that his wife had exploded in the middle of the living room.  At ground zero was a great bloody starburst, and at its center were Molly’s slippered feet, blown ...

The street is a billowing carpet of cobblestones, rising up and down, up and down, like ocean waves.  The locals nap behind heavy curtains and painted shutters; the tourists have flocked to the beach. I’ve ...

The woman with the suitcase full of stars arrived at the walled city on a night so cold the clouds refused to surrender snow.  The gates, for many centuries merely ornamental, swung open at the ...

Her scarf sits loose around her neck as she walks the last six blocks to her apartment, cashmere wedged between her skin and the upturned collar of her coat. A knit cap with a white ...

You’re a good-looking kid and all the androids want to fuck you. Why not get paid for it?  *** I see six androids in this place, right now, undressing you with their eyes. You’re so ...

Our eyes look nothing like yours.  I only learned this recently, and since then have been increasingly fixated on why. We can see down here; your kind cannot. Our commonality lies in the tendency to ...

My dad gave me the ansible when I was ten. It was a little black box with holes poked in on one side to hear the people through.  I cupped it in my hands and ...

The year Father Christmas vanished, the other Holidays gathered together to fashion a replacement. Each volunteered something of themselves in their best approximation of how they remembered the bygone Holiday.  Valentine shrugged off his red ...

Shannon was waiting at the threshold of the patio, balancing a metal tray of shrimp between her shoulder and her wrist. "It's very important work, I think," said the first man. "Yes, well, of course ...

Monica walks home from the coffee shop, her flip flops slapping the uneven sidewalk. Her mind is cloudy; she was supposed to be studying for an exam but instead got lost in memories. She cringes ...

Dearest Seori of House Yunawon, Have you been sleeping well? I’m writing this just as I have been stirred to waking by the most mysterious yet magnificent of dreams. Something tells me that I must ...

She left the path and stepped into the woods. Fallen branches crunched underfoot. A honeyed sunlight spilled in through the trees, glazing the forest in an amber glow.  The air was redolent with that easy ...

It opened. Right there in front of me. It opened.  I would like to say it surprised me, but I was expecting it. So I wasn’t surprised, per se. I was more awed that it ...

First of all, let me say: Fuck you, asshole! You’re alive!  I’m only kidding, kind of.  I for real think it’s cool that if you’re reading this, it most likely means you are human and ...

You had to be a certain kind of person to own a business called Blood of Christ Wine, Beer, and Liquor, and we never quite figured out what kind of person that was. But Nick ...

When I was a child a mendicant man came to our village.  He wasn’t old, but everything about him was gray. His hair was the shade of dirty ashes and his skin greasy as old ...

Imogen had given birth. She’d had a daughter. She had pushed for hours, from the time the sun rose until it crept back down and disappeared beyond the horizon, like an animal burrowing into the ...

I found the Polaroid on the road, but I knew it came from the Uber.  I’d gone out for drinks with coworkers, and rather than take the train home, I figured I’d treat myself to ...

I was six when Dad left Mum and me in a storm of curses and broken dishes. After that, it was quieter at home, and I saw Dad every second weekend.  He gave me the ...

There’s no grand opening, no advertising. There’s just one endless summer day after another, and then the curl of fall leaves across the storefront on mainstreet, and when the leaves touch the ground you look ...